Potter's Field

Charlie Higson: Silverfin

The New York Sun, May 20, 2015

With Clint Eastwood reduced to making films about ladies who box, Bond, James Bond, is the last true man's man. He blows smoke in the face of surgeons-general, adds no fruit juice to his martinis, and gives the pieties of feminism a pass. He has survived knives, a wife, bullets, nasty mechanical pincers, beatings, grenades, piranhas, and tortures too beastly to describe in a family newspaper. He's seen off Blofeld, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, No, Drax, and even that impertinent oaf, Austin Powers. He has weathered the challenges of SMERSH, Rosa Klebb's shoes, Roger Moore's safari suits, and the notion that M can be Dame Judi Dench. Now 007 faces his greatest, and potentially most humiliating, threat yet. James Bond - sophisticate, seducer, secret agent - has just been reimagined as a 13-year-old boy.

Charlie Higson's "SilverFin" (Miramax Books, 335 pages, $16.95), the first of five planned "Young James Bond" novels, was published in Britain earlier this year to dark mutterings from the veteran spy's fans, critical approval, and impressively strong sales. Now (don't tell Felix Leiter) it has been released over here. A comic book is also in the works. There is, predictably enough, also talk of a movie, although widespread (and now denied) rumors that the film would star Orlando Bloom as Bond Jr. seemed to ignore the fact that, fresh-faced though he may be, the former elf is well past puberty.

If all this sounds like there is someone somewhere trying to milk an old franchise for all it's worth, that's because it's true. Ian Fleming came from a distinguished, and famously shrewd, Scottish banking family that has never, in all its long history, been known to overlook the chance of making a pound or two. Fleming sold a controlling stake in his literary estate to the publishers, Booker plc, before his death, but the Fleming family bought it back in the late 1990s, and (the London Guardian reports) "a wave of new projects, including Bond merchandising and games, is being prepared."

The early chapters of "SilverFin" show the fine-tuned commercial instincts of those canny Scots at work. Its opening chapters set the scene in a manner that cannot fail to lure in all those potential buyers bored of waiting, waiting, waiting for their next fix of J.K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter, young Bond is an orphan, although mountaineering, not magic, is to blame for his parents' unfortunate demise. Like Potter, Bond is sent off to boarding school. An unconvincingly described Eton stands in for Hogwarts.

Needless to say, poor James has to contend with his very own Draco Malfoy, a villainous fellow pupil with, like Draco, a powerful father behind him. Trapped by the decidedly unsupernatural nature of his hero, Mr. Higson is unable to add the additional excitement of a brutal contact sport played on flying broomsticks: There's no Quidditch at Eton. Bond triumphs, instead, in cross-country running.

Mr. Higson's decision to cast as Bond's best chums two Indian and Chinese boys, rare birds indeed in a "public" school in 1930s England, is probably no less calculated. Pritpal Nandra and Tommy Chong will delight the diversity police always so busy patrolling the world of children's literature, and probably be good boxoffice, too. The same is true of "Red" Kelly, Bond's handily proletarian sidekick, useful in a punch-up and essential for giving young James the street cred that today's market calls for. We are told early on that Kelly thinks the privileged Etonian is "all right" despite being a "toff," and thus a member, we are supposed to understand, of a hated enemy caste.

That such touches are hopelessly anachronistic does not seem to worry the author too much. With the exception of a few pieces of carefully inserted period detail, there is little about this book that gives any real sense of the time in which it is supposedly set. Or, for that matter, the place: The Scotland in which James's adventure comes to its pleasantly savage conclusion is as bogus as "Brigadoon," utterly lacking the beguiling tweedy tartan authenticity that John Buchan brought to his "Thirty-Nine Steps."

Despite these - considerable - flaws, the second half of "SilverFin" gallops splendidly along with a fabulously nutty plot that involves sinister German scientists, carnivorous eels, man-eating pigs, daring escapes, grotesque deaths, a megalomaniac American businessman, and enough steroid abuse to launch a baseball team. Once he gets going, Mr. Higson displays a fine sense of pace, and a genuine ability to write the enjoyably un pleasant descriptions that will delight the small ghouls who will make up so much of his audience:

"James recoiled, but then forced himself to look at what had once been a man. ... The face was wrecked: it looked as if it had been split down the middle and forced apart, so that the nose was flattened and stretched, the teeth had separated and the eyes had curved around almost to the sides of his head. The eyes were the worst part. They were dark and wet, and James saw in them, not murder, but sadness and pain."

That's splendid stuff, but not quite good enough to buy forgiveness for what "SilverFin" (not to mention the annoying anti-smoking infomercials that pop up periodically throughout the book in an attempt, presumably, to dispel the fatal allure of a certain special agent's Balkan- and Turkish-blend cigarettes) could do to the commander's image. Those of his fans brave enough to read it will need to take appropriate steps afterward to banish the idea of 007 as a retro Cody Banks from their heads.

May I suggest a couple of vodka martinis? Shaken, not stirred.